Complete Players

At 7 A.M. on a recent Saturday, thirteen boys plunked their hockey bags down on the corner of 110th Street and Lenox Avenue, on the rocky northern border of Central Park. It was too early in the morning to talk much. The boys, the Ice Hockey in Harlem midget team—the under-eighteens—jogged in small packs to the deli across the street for egg sandwiches and bottles of juice. Then they boarded a yellow school bus bound for Philadelphia.

Led by the program manager Brad Preston, two volunteer coaches (I was one of them), and two parents, the team would visit the National Constitution Center, play two games at different rinks, and try to get some sleep at the Sheraton. (That part would turn out to be tricky, thanks to raucous St. Patrick’s Day revellers in the elevators and hallways.) They would play yet another game on Sunday morning, then take a campus tour of Drexel University before heading back to New York. The few gaps in the schedule would be packed with ordering hoagies, waiting for hoagies, and eating hoagies.

Forty kids got a chance to hit the ice for free with Ice Hockey in Harlem in 1987, its inaugural year. This year, the number of participants peaked at two hundred and thirty-three, in a season that also featured the début of Lady Harlem, an all-girls team. Ice hockey has not yet taken North Manhattan by storm, but that’s part of its power and fun. It is out of the ordinary—transgressive, even—to prefer hockey over basketball or baseball. Skates carving ice and sheering to stops, sticks tapping out code for passes, and missed shots ricocheting off boards makes for alternative music here.

After a 7-0 loss to the Wissahickon Skating Club on Saturday afternoon, the Ice Hockey in Harlem players did not agonize over their mistakes. They looked forward to playing again that night, in a mixed scrimmage with two teams, Wissahickon and Ed Snider Hockey, a free-to-play program started in 2005 by Edward M. Snider, the chairman of Comcast Spectacor, whose holdings include the Philadelphia Flyers and the Wells Fargo Center.

The scrimmage resulted in a 10-10 tie, broken by an elaborate shootout that included every player from all three teams. The night ended in a general celebration. The next morning, Ed Snider Hockey beat Ice Hockey in Harlem 10-3, but spirits remained high. When the timekeeper kept forgetting to click the button to start the clock, the Harlem kids shouted in chorus, “No, coach! Don’t tell him!” Even though they were getting thwacked, they wanted the bonus minutes.

The Harlem midgets’ short bench of just thirteen players includes four sets of brothers. Sulayman and Musa Ibrahim, all the way from the Bronx, are lanky scoring threats with some of the fastest hands in New York City youth hockey. The Ibrahim brothers dangle too much, and can lose the puck, but they also regularly astonish by weaving ornamentally through the stiff fabric of the opposition. Alexis and Gerardo Lopez, of West Harlem, are stoics; their composure is rare in a game of jump-starts, sprints, and sudden changes in momentum. Umar and Mohammed Khan, of East Harlem, are playmakers, at ease both in the neutral zone and down low in the corners. Allan and Eddie Zheng, a second pair from East Harlem, make quick, convincing decisions with the puck in tight spaces. The Zhengs are complete hockey players: reliable defenders, yet capable of surprise on the attack.

The team bus parked back at the top of Central Park at 6 P.M. on Sunday, full of hoagied-out, slumbering kids and bags of wet equipment. But, as they were dragging their stuff off the back of the bus, a rumor woke them. The boys didn’t split for the subway and bus lines as expected; they formed a near-perfect circle on the corner. The word was that, by some confusion of scheduling, Ice Hockey in Harlem had an ice sheet at 7:50 P.M. at their home rink, Lasker, just a couple hundred yards inside the park. They could play again.